Guest editorial: Meanings, contexts and future of ageing studies: intersections of age and ageing with organizations

Abstract

The intersection of age and ageing with organizations has not been extensively addressed in academic literature. There are studies published on age/ageing and motivation to continue working (e.g. Kooij et al., 2008), multiple jeopardy (King, 1988), such as age intersections with gender, race, sexual orientation, sexual preference, etc. (e.g. Riach et al., 2014), and discrimination and discriminatory practices in organizations (e.g. Duncan and Loretto, 2004; James and Wooten, 2006). More often than not, however, the tone and the approach taken by age and ageing studies replicate determinism and negative connotations that are associated with the elderly (Salminen et al., 2018) or that speak to self-evidence with respect to age and ageing in the workplace (Nelson, 2005). Furthermore, age and ageing in organizations are reflected as a grand narrative which essentializes and universalizes the older worker into one stable, stereotypical understanding or compares this older worker to a younger worker as if this younger individual is the norm to follow within an organizational context.

Tied to these under-developed ontological and epistemological notions of the older worker in organizations, the question of how to surface critical meanings around age and ageing, beyond chronological, time-dependent assumptions, remains an unanswered area across the literature. Having said this, there are interesting methodologies that have been used in the past (e.g. Jack et al., 2016; Tomlinson and Colgan, 2014), and there are interesting debates surrounding age, ageing and organizations that underscore a need for discourses and the discursive nature of age and ageing in organizations to be folded into our knowledge (Aaltio et al., 2017; Thomas et al., 2014). Furthermore, there are multiple reflexive subjectivities (Hayes et al., 2016) that are context-specific (Hulko, 2009), along with materially-discursive constructions of age and ageing that are possible (Hearn and Parkin, 2021). This special issue focuses on the critical qualitative methodological paths that explore this intersection of age and ageing with organizations and surfaces some critical meanings around this intersection.